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Because the Bourgeois Life is Unaesthetic and Anti-Heroic

Vox-Nova contributor Blackadder is perturbed by the ways in which fictional portrayals can distort our perception of certain aspects of reality and classes of persons. His points concerning stereotyped portrayals of gun violence on television and in the movies, and portrayals of minorities are well taken. He also suggests that something similar transpires with respect to portrayals of the world of business. There is, however, a difference between the examples. While one can easily imagine the portrayal of licit employments of violence, or sensitive portrayals of minority characters, it is not so easy to imagine interesting portrayals of the virtuous businessman. Blackadder writes:

Or, to take another example. Business and commerce when depicted in fiction tend to be depicted negatively. Businessmen are greedy and unscrupulous, corporations are at the center of all kinds of plots and conspiracies, and trade is often a thin veneer placed over fraud and coercion. It is easy to understand, even apart from the ideological dispositions of artists, why businessmen and large corporations would make desirable villains and why positive depictions of the marketplace might not make for interesting drama. But for people who themselves lack much business instinct and have little direct experience of what goes on in a corporate boardroom, might not such repeated impressions create in their minds a more unfavorable impression of markets than they would gain from actually experiencing such things first hand?

In my estimation, the reasons for such portrayals are more or less manifest: the bourgeois order is utilitarian and calculating, and such an ethos is antithetical to even the most rudimentary aesthetic impulses; an order predicated upon the pursuit of material betterment, spurred by the passions, is quite different from art, or even entertainment, the former of which strives to present intuitions and intimations of being, the latter of which to excite us for a time. Relatedly, business, the day-to-day grind of commerce, is often infinitely tedious, unrelated to much that links its participants with any grand cosmic themes. There are two paths out of this thicket of ennui for any writer who wishes to portray such subjects - either the tropes of corruption and scandal, which remain of perennial interest, or the attempted introduction of heroic themes, as in the (quite dreadful) fiction of Ayn Rand, which ends in a quasi-fascist worship of the Great Material Benefactor, a mirror image of the political religions of totalitarianism, as Whittaker Chambers noted in his panning of Atlas Shrugged. Since the latter is so obviously awful, there are fairly sound aesthetic reasons for the concentration upon themes of corruption in portrayals of the world of business. Otherwise, such portrayals would be not so much art or entertainment as exercises in didacticism: Do likewise, and you too might become rich! Some like that sort of thing. Most of us change the channel. Fictional versions of the business world, or the markets, generally speaking, must be either boring, if they are exercises in capitalist realism, or lurid portrayals of corruption, intrigue, and incipient fascism, in which case we might watch, or read.

Comments (50)

Well, even if the bourgeois life is unaesthetic and anti-heroic, I say, thank God for it. Lots of life is unaesthetic and anti-heroic, including many things people need to have done and to do and through which they can work out their salvation, support and care for their bourgeois families, and bring glory to God. How aesthetic and heroic is a dirty diaper? So I'm not bothered by the unaesthetic nature of the business world.

Nor am I, generally (although our liberal society, in which commerce is the dominant discourse and form of social organization, fills me with a vague sense of horror), though I've not much patience for the paeans some conservatives want to sing to it. It is surely necessary, within measure. But it is boring, and makes for crappy literature and television, and that is why portrayals of business in those media tend to be negative - because that's the only way to create any interest.

I actually kind of disagree that the business world is unaesthetic. It has an aesthetic which is similar in kind to that of mathematics or engineering, that is, of a kind that it is not universally appreciated and is difficult (though not impossible) to communicate to outsiders, especially in certain media like film. (I'd point out though that there is plenty of tedium on film as well as in the strategy room). It may be perhaps a 'low' art like a well-executed football play or ground assault or fistfight; but it is there nonetheless.

The bulk of legal work is also pure tedium. I would imagine the same is true for police work, the practice of medicine, etc. Outside of Jim Jarmusch, any fictional narrative is going to involve spicing things up and cutting down the dreary bits to a musical montage. I think, though, that most films manage to portray their heroes without having them devolve into quasi-fascist cardboard cutouts. Maybe there's something about commerce that prevents a similarly heroic depiction of businessmen. Maybe not. But either way, one has to thing that the repeated exposure to negative images of business is going to color one's perceptions of things more generally.

I have to say that chess doesn't make for much of a spectator sport, either. Except, perhaps, to the Russians. :-) But chess is very beautiful in the intellectual sense. Perhaps a relevant analogy. (My family is very "into" chess, by the way, so this is meant as a positive analogy. I'm the untalented member of the bunch in that area but still understand the passion.)

"Lots of life is unaesthetic and anti-heroic...and bring glory to God."

I see a contradiction, Lydia. It is in faithfully performing the mundane chores of everyday life that we give glory to God. Therefore, nothing is anti-heroic for the Christian.

"that is why portrayals of business in those media tend to be negative - because that's the only way to create any interest."

Oh, oh. Please tell me you're not accepting the joyless, one-dimensional desacralized understanding of work. It is a great gift that allows us to share in God's creative process while attaining personal dignity and self-respect. Stripped of this basic truth, the reductionist mind can only mock, then finally kill that which it cannot grasp.

It has an aesthetic which is similar in kind to that of mathematics or engineering, that is, of a kind that it is not universally appreciated and is difficult (though not impossible) to communicate to outsiders, especially in certain media like film.

I can appreciate that analogy, although there is often an elegance to mathematics and engineering which seems to be to be blunted - and therewith the aesthetic - by the "I'm doing this for money" aspect of business. It's not, of course, that earning money qua earning money is bad, it's merely that it is difficult to associate with the beautiful.

The bulk of legal work is also pure tedium. I would imagine the same is true for police work, the practice of medicine, etc.

Absolutely. Accounting, in my estimation, is the quintessence of tedium. But law, policing, and medicine more readily accept the introduction of dramatic elements, be they mysteries to be solved, antagonists to be overcome or what have you. Business, not so much. Supply problems, slipshod engineering, and salespeople who refuse to follow directions do not make for compelling drama.

But either way, one has to thing that the repeated exposure to negative images of business is going to color one's perceptions of things more generally.

Certainly. But I don't believe that this takes the form of an "all businessmen are crooks and socialism is the answer" sort of sentiment. Most people recognize that the businesses they deal with on a regular basis are normal and upstanding, generally speaking; what media portrayals of heroic corporate corruption tend to do is to render people more suspicious of certain classes of businessmen in certain circumstances, the classes of businessmen of whom they are already likely to be suspicious on the basis of new reporting. No one became suspicious of Wall Street tycoons or bond traders after watching Bonfire of the Vanities or Wall Street; they were already suspicious because they had heard or read about Michael Milken. Fictional portrayals exercise a compounding effect upon previously existing sentiment.

No. Many of the employments in which men can assume the role of co-creator are ascetic, in that they require dying to oneself. There is a kind of joy, nobility, and beauty to be found it that, but it tends not to be the kind that lends itself to fictionalized portrayals.

"Many of the employments in which men can assume the role of co-creator are ascetic, in that they require dying to oneself."

The dying to oneself can, in fact must occur in the for-profit world of commerce as well. It will be different than a monastic endeavor, but given the structural temptations to self-assertion and commodification of others, no less noble, or beautiful. Unless we recover the sense of vocation, I fear we will be subsumed within a heartless technological construct and rendered lifeless.

But law, policing, and medicine more readily accept the introduction of dramatic elements, be they mysteries to be solved, antagonists to be overcome or what have you. Business, not so much. Supply problems, slipshod engineering, and salespeople who refuse to follow directions do not make for compelling drama.

Nor does 90% of what goes on in a police department, law firm, prosecutor's office, private practice or hospital. The overwhelming majority of it is as purely tedious as anything one sees in the office. The closest thing to made-for-tv excitement that most doctors will ever know on the job is having an affair with their receptionist or a nurse. Most cops will never come within several miles of The Shield. Most prosecutors will spend their time plea-bargaining offenses down so they can add notches on their belt.

In short, like business, it's only in the rarest of circumstances that a doctor, lawyer or cop will have the sort of experience that might be entertaining if fictionalized.

One can only wonder how many of the cops out there today have been mentally corrupted by all of the action packed, in-your-face, thuggish media out there that makes police work look exciting.

One can only wonder how many of the cops out there today have been mentally corrupted by all of the action packed, in-your-face, thuggish media out there that makes police work look exciting.

The number is greater than it is comfortable to acknowledge.

The overwhelming majority of it is as purely tedious as anything one sees in the office.

Absolutely, though, as I have argued, those professions more readily accept, in fictional portrayals, the introduction of dramatic and human interest elements than business. Many of us will watch a programme or film about cops catching the bad guys, while few will watch one about a businessman streamlining a production process, overcoming recalcitrant salespeople, or browbeating noncompliant suppliers.

I see a contradiction, Lydia. It is in faithfully performing the mundane chores of everyday life that we give glory to God. Therefore, nothing is anti-heroic for the Christian.

Actually, Kevin, I'm strongly inclined to agree with you. That was more or less my point. I don't see that there's much point (beyond implying "I don't like capitalism") in going around saying that things are "bourgeois" and "unaesthetic." Goodness! I thought we were supposed to be all about encouraging people to, in Thomas Howard's words, be "merry and thankful and lowly" and do all to the glory of God.

It seems to me that there's a very simple reason why medicine and police work lend themselves better to heroic fictional portrayal than business: They can be thought of as helping specific people directly. So the TV writer or novelist just thinks of a situation where somebody needs a disease cured or has been in an accident or where a bad guy needs to be caught and has instant drama. Business work does, in fact, help people just as much. In fact, if it weren't for all those boring businessmen, the society wouldn't have the wealth with which to pay the policemen and furnish medical supplies for the doctors. But the help is indirect. The work doesn't consist directly in solving someone's life-threatening problem or bringing justice for a crime. Hence, it doesn't make for easy portrayal as drama.

I recommend George Gilder's moving portrayal of the genius, heroism, faith, generosity, and creativity that attach to some forms of entrepreneurship in his book The Spirit of Enterprise. It gives flesh to Zippy's earlier assertion that the life of business and of commerce can, indeed, embody valuable things like beauty and virtue.

I also endorse Gilder's remarkable argument in Wealth and Poverty that Christian values are capitalist values. I think it's a work of near genius.

Lydia, this post was neither conceptualized as a semiotic exercise, as a means of signaling that its author "does not like capitalism", nor posted as a provocation. Bourgeois is a descriptive term. Terming the life of business unaesthetic by criteria most commonly recognized, even if only implicitly, is not intended to denigrate licit employments, or even to minimize the benefits of licit commerce; it is merely to observe that, for any number reasons, the bourgeois life does not provide compelling material for fictional media, certainly not by contrast with, say, the western, or virtually any other genre.

Of course, those of us employed in the realm of business should perform our tasks to the glory of God, with diligence and humility, neither exalting ourselves above our stations, nor indulging in the false humility of exaggerated abasement. We should endeavour to perceive things as they are.

I'd heartily endorse Gilder's Men and Marriage, but Wealth and Poverty has always impressed me as a sustained brief for the contention that Christian anthropology and the modernist anthropology of affects and drives are fundamentally identical, and that Christian virtue consists of intrepidity in the stimulation and satisfaction of hitherto unknown desires. Then again, my allegiance to the ascetical theology of Orthodoxy cannot but lead me to that conclusion.

I've had a number of just really awesome, "shoot out at the OK corral" moments in business. But my own experiences are a long, long way from typical. On the other hand, those kinds of moments are atypical in any endeavor, including the ones which are dramatized in film. Heck, even painting a painting or making a sculpture is a long exercise in tedium.

I think there tends to be a natural (if unfortunate) antagonism between different sorts of people. Engineers and salesmen are a good example within business. It seems as though there is a similar antagonism writ larger between artists and businessmen, and it makes sense that there would be. Art actually is a higher calling in the sense that it is not as fettered by crass economic considerations; business actually is more robustly 'real' than art because it is more constrained by nature in a day-to-day, nuts and bolts kind of way and has to concretely make peoples' lives better in some tangible way in order to exist at all. There is a natural tendency, all other things equal and given fallen human nature, for there to be a measure of envy and contempt between businesspeople and artists. This does exist elsewhere: artists like to portray police as corrupt, for example. But I think that businessmen with wealth and great practical authority on the one hand, and artists with no practical authority except their art on the other, are in a sense at polar extremes of these natural antagonisms. This shows in how the artist often, though by no means always, portrays the businessman; and in the low regard in which the businessman often, though not always, holds the artist. More generally the practical arts are always in some tension with purely aesthetic arts, because it is just human nature to view one's own place in the scheme of things as uniquely important.

One of my favorite and at the same time one of the most frustrating practical arts is the art of leadership: of getting disparate individuals who don't much care for each other at parties all contributing together to some larger goal. I think part of why I like it is that it requires the leader to respect disparate kinds of contributions as valuable. Good leadership requires a rather unique combination of hubris and humility: hubris to take on the role of leader in the first place, and humility in the recognition of the importance of very disparate contributors, many of whom are on the far opposite end of the envelope of human nature from onesself.

Maximos is surely right that the practical arts are different inasmuch as they are not the pursuit of beauty for its own sake. But I think a lot of the antagonism we see for businessmen in film comes from the natural disposition artists have to think the worst of businessmen. And perhaps unfortunately, the feeling tends to be mutual.

Steve, yes, I would hope that it is on these matters we will forever be of the same accord.

Lydia, sorry, I misinterpreted your remarks and thought them defensive. I know you've infused the changing of diapers with glorius self-giving.

Not sure if the sanctification of the workplace is found in books on enterprise, since I haven't read any, but I know I should strive to make an altar of my desk. Not easy, but that is where the sacrifice and self-immolation come in.

Well, yes, in a word. The businessman tends to dismiss the artistic calling, and often the humane arts generally, as wholly unsuited to the real business of life, which is to get wealth. Had I a dollar for every time I've heard solid men of the corporate world attempt to dissuade young people from pursuing callings in the realms of art, literature, philosophy, and so forth, I'd not now be in the business world. Had I a dollar for every time friends of mine studying international business and finance counseled me to jettison the philosophy in favour of their professional tracks, on the grounds of their lucrative potentialities, I'd likewise be loafing at home. The businessman also, to the extent that he does not hold the arts in contempt, tends to be desirous of commodifying them, which, to the artist conscious of his vocation, is but profanation. As I suggested in the piece I wrote on this subject back in March, I suspect that modernity's assignment of commerce the central role in human civilization has exacerbated a tension which was much less pronounced in pre-modern times. There was little reason for the artist to inveigh against the merchant when the artist's labours adorned the churches, the central institutions of an earlier phase of our civilization; being pushed to the periphery inclines one to negative appraisals.

Fictional versions of the business world, or the markets, generally speaking, must be either boring, if they are exercises in capitalist realism, or lurid portrayals of corruption, intrigue, and incipient fascism, in which case we might watch, or read.

Since the "season" is approaching, what about "It's a Wonderful Life"? Surely there are other, perhaps better examples (tho' none are immediately coming to mind), where an honest businessman (qua honest businessman) is the hero... Or perhaps it is the exception that proves the rule?

I was thinking about It's a Wonderful Life last evening, as I wrote, and I believe that it is exceptional as a film precisely because of the Bailey-Potter antagonism, and the self-doubts and torments this arouses in Bailey, not to mention the backdrop of the Depression. It is not obvious that these thematic elements are broadly applicable, a sort of template for making business flicks, or capitalist realism, interesting.

Great discussion, folks. For myself, I'd like to hear some of Zippy's "shootout at the OK corral" moments in business.

The only recent example in film I can call to mind where business was memorably portrayed as heroic and sublime was the Scorsese movie about Howard Hughes, The Aviator. There you got a sense of the singular amalgam of thought and action, of a kind of statesmanship, that appears in great men of enterprise. It cannot be said that Hughes denigrated the world of ideas; in his the world of aviation, his mind was alive to ideas as few others ever have been. Add to that that he was a famous man of action, drive and will and . . . well, you have yourself a compelling story indeed.

I really enjoyed this post and the back and forth in the comments. I think Lydia gets at the heart of the problem with portraying the business world in a dramatic fashion when she says doctors and cops can be "thought of as helping specific people directly." This human interaction, particularly during some sort of crisis, is the stuff of drama. I do think the business world lends itself well to comedy -- witness the enormous success of "The Office" and many movies about the corporate world that involve all sorts of ridiculous hijinks related to striving for the bonus, promotion, etc.

As a final recommendation, although it is not a drama, this documentary (and the work of the Acton Institute more broadly) attempts to portray business in a heroic light:

It would seem to me that the _It's a Wonderful Life_ template _could_ lend itself to more drama--the honest businessman against the dishonest one. Or (at the risk of sounding Randian--hopefully not) I do think that if the political inclinations of our dramatists were different, one could make an excellent drama about a businessman driven out of business or nearly driven out of business by unjust laws. If one needs bad guys, bureaucrats aren't a bad source. And even more than Rand does or tries to do, one could portray a "family-friendly" business in which the businessman is partly agonized for the sake of his workers who will be out of a job if his business is brought to its knees. From a Christian perspective, I see no reason why one couldn't make a heart-wrenching story (all too realistic) of a businessman who refuses to go along with the homosexual rights agenda and, in keeping his soul, loses the world, with a lot of little guys getting harmed along the way by the jackbooted tread of government in league with social engineering.

I worked in theater and film for a small portion of my life, and let me assure you that movies and television are about image. The novel Les Miserables has 150 pages to set up the taking of the silver by Val Jean and a two and a half hour movie has about 10 minutes to get that under its belt and so character development is not a luxury that they can afford. Unless the movie is about revealing a hidden nature slowly, the movie must rely on easy to grasp archetypes if it is going to focus on a plotline. Corrupt business man! Got it, I have seen this character before. It is Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. Honest hardworking business underdog! Got it, like George Bailey.

A good example at how Hollywood has no allegiance is the ever shifting perception of law enforcement. Depending on whom the hero is the different agencies vacillate between being the only good officers to the ultimate buffoons to the paradigm of corruption. The stupid FBI in Die Hard can’t get anything right, while the stupid local cops in Fugitive screw everything up for the brilliant U.S. Marshalls. The CIA is a bunch of corrupt idiots except when Jack Ryan is around and then they are the force that holds the line on world order. Internal Affairs are either the incorruptible watchers of the watchmen or they are climbers that betrayed their police brethren for career advancement.

The trade is in the simplicity of the image. They need us to “get” the characters without thinking about them. This identification does not necessarily have to relate to real world associations. We can recognize corruption and evil in all strata of the professional world within fiction by associating it with past fictional references. (the h**ker with the heart of gold) In order to recognize corrupt police officers quickly in a film, it is not necessary that I believe they honestly represent actual police corruption. Do people make that mistake? Sure. Just as soap opera actors are periodically accosted on the streets for something their character did, but we must hope that this represents a small minority.

Where I agree that it is bad practice with negative consequences in when we fictionalize offenses by real people or social groups is mentioned above. Aaron Sorkin is particularly guilty of this offense. He used Jerry Falwell in a fictional plotline on Sportsnight. The pilot for West Wing portrayed pro-lifers as political hypocrites and a Baptist pastor as unable to identify the 1st Commandment, which the liberal politicians gladly explained to him. Sorkin mixes the real with the fictional in a way that I think is prone to create confusion. I have known otherwise intelligent people who praised Clinton for a speech on gun control that appeared in the film The American President.

Absolutely, though, as I have argued, those professions more readily accept, in fictional portrayals, the introduction of dramatic and human interest elements than business.

Here's an example for you on the business side of things for a show. A businessman sets up shop in Africa or Latin America. He's rich, but he also funds a lot of soup kitchens and other things to help the poor. Thuggish government tries to steal his business, the businessman then hires a mercenary outfit that engages in guerrilla warfare to protect his business and to stop government agents from raping and pillaging their own people.

It's no more outlandish than half of the things we are told happen in the ER, on a daily basis for cops, or behind the scenes in the legal profession. I suspect the reason that it would be rejected is that many people are indoctrinated to view businessmen as greedy vermin who occasionally do some good.

Business is often boring, but I think there is a very real feeling that it is portrayed in an intensely negative, even hateful way by Hollywood. I think the real reason they are so antagonistic toward it isn't that it's usually boring for a movie setting, but because of personal hatred toward it.

The utilitarian ethos of materialistic striving runs contrary to a life in the Spirit. The depersonalized hamster wheel of commercialization typically suffocates the artistic impulse and creative energies that can only flow from genuine communion. Economic systems are not the answer, as the abysmal state of our culture makes clear, but in steeling ourselves with deep sense of vocation. It is very difficult for me to inoculate myself against Mammon’s soul-sapping values, while simultaneously maintaining a proper sense of gratittude for the opportunity to earn my daily bread. Yet, that is part of the Cross a disciple must bear in the hectic, often inhuman marketplace. The tension of doing so certainly acts as a great antidote against ennui and boredom.

I actually kind of disagree that the business world is unaesthetic. It has an aesthetic which is similar in kind to that of mathematics or engineering, that is, of a kind that it is not universally appreciated and is difficult (though not impossible) to communicate to outsiders, especially in certain media like film.

If this is true, then Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are, indeed, the artists of the business world while those who were the "start-up & bail" crowd during the Tech Boom were but its whores.

Yes, the latter made some money; however, they lacked the natural skill, business acumen and grace of the former -- so much so that it's no wonder they were so quick to sell their fledgling enterprises as soon as they got them up.

I suspect that modernity's assignment of commerce the central role in human civilization has exacerbated a tension which was much less pronounced in pre-modern times. There was little reason for the artist to inveigh against the merchant when the artist's labours adorned the churches, the central institutions of an earlier phase of our civilization; being pushed to the periphery inclines one to negative appraisals.

Atheistic materialism has certainly had a role here. Good art generally has a spiritual aspect to it and a certain je ne sais quoi that defines acceptance in a materialistic culture that evaluates things based only on their utility and/or exclusivity. The artist isn't so much struggling against the merchant as he is struggling against the materialism that pervades modern culture.

For me, part of the proof here that there is little inherent fight here against the merchant is that never before has so high of a percentage of society been employed in a fields that produce no wealth. I would guess that about 10-15% of the American people are employed by governments or derive their income directly from them. Many more work for non-profits, are stay at home spouses or something else that isn't directly involved in producing wealth.

And yet... despite the fact that so many people have been freed from having to prove their worth by producing wealth, the arts are no better off than they were a few hundred years ago in many respects.

Kevin: The utilitarian ethos of materialistic striving runs contrary to a life in the Spirit. The depersonalized hamster wheel of commercialization typically suffocates the artistic impulse and creative energies that can only flow from genuine communion.

I think this is true. It's not so much "business" that is unaesthetic and anti-heroic, but the kind of business that is normative today, grounded as it is on depersonalizing economies of scale, strict boundaries of specialization, and profit motivations. It's a Wonderful Life and the apprenticeship model are both examples of the possibilities of beauty in business that come to mind.

The materialism of modern culture is integrally linked with commerce, through the substrate of the Hobbesian/Lockean anthropology of affects and drives, according to which it is simply human nature to desire unlimited access to terrestrial pleasures, goods, and powers, and to struggle against one's fellow man for the acquisition of the same, from which generations of political economists drew the lesson that capitalism, under the guidance of some form of political sovereignty, would transmogrify this welter of conflicting egoisms into the maximal aggregate satisfaction of all such egoisms. Capitalism, in fine, has been theorized as the instrumentality of unfettered desire, as the mechanism for the satisfaction of untutored human nature assumed as an axiom, and not as a summons to become what one is, namely, and image of God, by means of ascetic repudiation of surplus desire.

Maximos, the solution is found at the personal level, regardless of the system. Modernity is crawling off to collapse in a heap of contradictions and fatal fictions, but we can all build little ports of refuge. Such knowledge can be both a source of consolation and consternation. I find myself mumbling, among other things; Be not Afraid, quite often.

Forgive the intrusion, but I wonder whether the confusion is over what Capitalism means, i.e. whether particular structural problems are intrinsic to the system itself or whether Capitalism is just another word for honest commerce between free peoples.

Ari, Albert is on the right path. Too much power is concentrated in the hands of a small, unaccountable managerial elite, while the values of the marketplace have subordubated all other activiites and belief-systems to its own pesuppostions,laws and rationalistic measurements. We need a return to a more human scale in our commercial practices and that requires a pretty large recalibration of our economic and social arrangements and priorities. Failing that, we will lose the little freedom we have left to us.

No social system is merely the aggregate of all individual actions; rather, patterns of conduct, custom, and institutions embodying the same exist in reciprocal relationships with members of society. In fact, where the solitary individual is concerned, the relationship is more nearly unidirectional - one either accepts the complex of social practices in question, or becomes to that extent an outsider. The term of art in much of that Continental philosophy most hate so much is "interpellation", a sort of attention-grabbing summons to fulfill one's expected social role by embracing the ethos of the dominant institutions.

Mike T has made a good point: More people than ever are actually free from having to go along with whatever the social roles are of commerce, yet they aren't producing great art.

Aristocles, I agree: "Capitalism" isn't something that should be labeled as always the culprit. It gets, well, boring to be talking that way all the time. If nothing else. I also think it isn't true. :-)

No capitalism as we know it is the offspring of the culprit, and a form of social reinforcement for that culprit. I find it boring to continue talking about how wonderful "capitalism" is, in defiance of the manifest polyvalence of the term, not to mention that manifestly unconservative nature of global capitalism, and about how horrible every alternative to this thing happens to be. Yawn.

And of course most moderns, when liberated from the 'shackles of the market system', continue to produce utter dreck. Why wouldn't they, when they still profess allegiance to the very thing which, in other contexts, generates the utilitarian, managerial-mass capitalism we possess: the defective anthropology of the superman?

And of course most moderns, when liberated from the 'shackles of the market system', continue to produce utter dreck. Why wouldn't they, when they still profess allegiance to the very thing which, in other contexts, generates the utilitarian, managerial-mass capitalism we possess: the defective anthropology of the superman?

You're downplaying a very severe indictment of a lot of systems that are taken for granted, Maximos. This cuts through a range of things from policy assumptions on copyright law, to the very perception of the nature of our modern society. It's the memetic equivalent of dismissing a small atomic bomb as a "mere explosive."

Of course the indictment will be stringent; we are ultimately dealing with foundational questions concerning human nature and the nature of the Good. Where the offense is as grave as the mismeasure of man and a resultant corruption of man's relationships with himself, his fellows, God, and the created order, the indictment must be correspondingly severe.

"Jesus's words are full of resentment against the rich, and the Apostles are no meeker in this respect. The Rich Man is condemned because he is rich, the Beggar praised because he is poor…. In God's Kingdom the poor shall be rich, but the rich shall be made to suffer. Later revisers have tried to soften the words of Christ against the rich … but there is quite enough left to support those who incite the world to hatred of the rich, revenge, murder and arson…. This is a case in which the Redeemer's words bore evil seed. More harm has been done, and more blood shed, on account of them than by the persecution of heretics and the burning of witches. They have always rendered the Church defenceless against all movements which aim at destroying human society. The church as an organization has certainly always stood on the side of those who tried to ward off communistic attack. But it … was continually disarmed by the words: “Blessed be ye poor; for yours is the Kingdom of God.” " (Socialism, p. 420)
Ludwig Von Mises

You're downplaying a very severe indictment of a lot of systems that are taken for granted, Maximos. This cuts through a range of things from policy assumptions on copyright law, to the very perception of the nature of our modern society. It's the memetic equivalent of dismissing a small atomic bomb as a "mere explosive."

Of course the indictment will be stringent; we are ultimately dealing with foundational questions concerning human nature and the nature of the Good. Where the offense is as grave as the mismeasure of man and a resultant corruption of man's relationships with himself, his fellows, God, and the created order, the indictment must be correspondingly severe.

One can riot and rage against the winds of modernity, its people and their tattered compass; yet, I don't know who is the greater fool: those and that socio-economic system that person is raging against or the person himself.

**One of the editors at Touchstone once wrote that he read Human Action as a Lenten penance, and pronounced it "disgusting and indigestible".**

Yes, and if memory serves he also described it as every bit as atheistic as Das Capital. In a personal conversation he recommended Wilhelm Roepke to me instead, the one Austrian economist that Russell Kirk liked. His book 'A Humane Economy' is well worth reading, and there is an intro to his thought by John Zmirak which is also quite good.

Fr. Reardon also told me once (I don't know if the notion is original to him) that the problem with modern capitalism is that economists have spent too much time with The Wealth of Nations and not enough with The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He was speaking metaphorically, of course, but the point is clear.

I've always wondered if Fr. Reardon's parents were fans of _Atlas Shrugged_. (Because of his name.) This is Patrick Henry Reardon we're talking about, yes? It seemed almost like too much for coincidence.

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